The following verses were written August 20, 1966 right after reading the direct statement of three young soldiers, who showed unusual bravery. The poetry is not as good as it should be; I hope folk process will improve it. If the choice of the melody seems not the best, some singers may want to try and find a better one.

BOBBY SANDS was born in 1954 in Rathcoole, a predominantly loyalist district of north Belfast. His twenty-seventh birthday fell on the ninth day of his sixty-six-day hunger strike. His sisters Marcella, one year younger, and Bernadette, were born in April 1955 and November 1958, respectively. All three lived their early years at Abbots Cross in the Newtownabbey area of north Belfast. A second son, John, now nineteen, was born to their parents John and Rosaleen, now both aged 57, in June 1962.

The sectarian realities of ghetto life materialised early in Bobby's life when at the age of ten his family were forced to move home owing to loyalist intimidation even as early as 1962. Bobby recalled his mother speaking of the troubled times which occurred during her childhood; 'Although I never really under stood what internment... (Continues)

An Irish republican song composed in the aftermath of the imposition of Internment without trial on some Irish republicans associated with Provisional Sinn Féin (now known simply as Sinn Féin) and other unconnected with militant republicanism who had been arrested by mistake in Northern Ireland in 1971. Three hundred and forty-two people, the oldest a man of 77, were interned on 9 August, 1971. The lyrics record the raiding of homes by the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the arrest of individuals who were detailed without trial in Long Kesh, a prison in Northern Ireland subsequently known as the Maze Prison. The central message of the... (Continues)